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Ever wanted to do the Lindy Hop as it was swung at the Savoy Ballroom in the 1930s? To rock your hips through the mambo like dancers at the Palladium Ballroom in the \u201950s? To pose as if in a vogue battle of the \u201980s? All in a museum? Now\u2019s your chance. Need a lesson? The Museum of the City of New York has you covered there, too.<\/p>\n
In \u201cUrban Stomp: Dreams & Defiance on the Dance Floor<\/a>,\u201d you can choose a record and put it on a turntable. So far, so ordinary. But wait. Here, spinning the record doesn\u2019t just cue music. People \u2014 in video form \u2014 appear all around you, dancing and inviting you to join them.<\/p>\n The exhibition, which guides visitors through some 200 years of social dance in New York City, includes all the artifacts, photographs, wall text and video footage that you might expect in a museum show. But scattered throughout are also video monitors featuring friendly experts who teach the basics of various dance styles. The video-interactive dance floor comes at the end of the show, and the idea is that by the time you arrive there, you know a little something.<\/p>\n This unusual approach derives from the show\u2019s subject. On the surface, \u201cUrban Stomp\u201d is about New York City as an incubator \u2014 \u201cfor either the creation of new dances or borrowing dances from other places and creating something new,\u201d said Sarah Henry, the museum\u2019s chief curator. But at a deeper level, it\u2019s about what Henry called \u201cthe constant churn and creativity of New York.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThe remixing, mashing up, a conversation of mutual influence that goes back to the 19th century, the promise of the city \u2014 all that is embodied on the dance floor,\u201d Henry said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The first tutorial video introduces early 20th-century ballroom dances popularized by Vernon and Irene Castle<\/a>, white influencers of their day who borrowed from Black dances and collaborated with the Black ragtime musician James Reese Europe<\/a>. A nearby vitrine has a few of the Castles\u2019 instruction manuals and a lock of Irene\u2019s hair, cut when she made the bob fashionable. You can look at those relics and then learn how to dance the fox trot and the Castle Walk.<\/p>\n Participation is built into the exhibition because the museum is trying to be more experiential, but also because the subject is dance. \u201cOne of the things we\u2019re trying to solve,\u201d Henry said, \u201cis how to do justice to dancing in an exhibition. It doesn\u2019t stay still. You can\u2019t just put it in a box.\u201d<\/p>\n The goal, she added, is a kind of \u201calchemy between the inert stuff that is quite eloquent\u201d: an invitation to the 1860 Prince of Wales ball; a collage of fliers and tickets for salsa clubs; \u201cand things that have three dimensions and bring the body into space\u201d \u2014 the trumpets of Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis, Celia Cruz\u2019s platform heels, Big Daddy Kane\u2019s flashy track suit. \u201cThat\u2019s the closest we can get to bringing those people here, and combined with historical footage and the instructional videos, you get the best chance of it coming to life.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n And if the dancing comes to life, so do the exhibition\u2019s themes. As the scholar Derek L. Washington, the show\u2019s other curator, put it, \u201cThe dance floor is a space where people are forming and reforming ideas about identity, race and gender. It\u2019s about migration, immigration, a form of storytelling for people who might have been marginalized.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In a sense, \u201cUrban Stomp\u201d is an expansion of \u201cRhythm & Power: Salsa in New York,\u201d<\/a> which Washington curated at the museum in 2017. That show focused on the mixture of Afro-Caribbean and European music and dance that was clumped under the umbrella term salsa in the 1960s. It looked at the influx of Puerto Rican immigrants in the 1950s and at salsa\u2019s predecessor in the Afro-Cuban mambo craze of that time. (The show was bilingual, as is \u201cUrban Stomp.\u201d)<\/p>\n After the salsa show, Washington turned to a community-based project called \u201cUrban Stomp: From Swing to Mambo,\u201d which extended the story back to swing jazz and swing dances, like the Charleston and the Lindy Hop, largely developed by Black residents of Harlem in the 1920s and \u201930s.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The \u201cUrban Stomp\u201d exhibition, stretching back into the 19th century and forward into the present, makes more connections, including the bachata and merengue of the Dominicans whose numbers surged in the 1980s and are now the city\u2019s largest immigrant group. A section near the end clusters vogue, hip-hop and the hustle: three genres that originated around the same time (the 1960s to the \u201980s) in some of the same neighborhoods (Harlem and the Bronx)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cVogue and hip-hop and the hustle are in conversation with earlier balls,\u201d Washington said. \u201cFinding and creating spaces to dance, different ways of being inclusive or exclusive, different costumes and regalia.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Giving a tour of the exhibition, Washington pointed out a dress worn at Studio 54 in the 1970s and how it resembled a tango dress in another gallery, worn by Irene Castle some 60 years before. \u201cThe changing same,\u201d he said. Similarly, a visitor following the tutorials might notice a step learned in the swing section recurring under a different name in the hip-hop part.<\/p>\n Washington stressed how carefully the show attends to many kinds of diversity. Gender, race and ethnicity, of course. But there\u2019s also diversity of age, borough and body type. The tutorials, as brief and basic as they are, also reveal diversity within each dance form: the many varieties of salsa or vogue and the distinctions among them (Salsa On2, Vogue Femme) or the hip-hop party dances of several generations (the Cabbage Patch, the Sturdy).<\/p>\n Most important, Washington said, was the input of leaders from each dance community. The lessons in vogue are taught by LeFierce LaBeija of the Royal House of LaBeija<\/a>. Founded by Crystal LaBeija in 1972, this Royal House was the first of the ballroom houses \u2014 homes and chosen families for queer people of color.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWe are so proud to have 10 months to display who we are and what we are about,\u201d said Jeffrey Bryant, the global overall overseer of the Royal House of LaBeija. Being in the museum, he added, \u201cis a radical statement to say, \u2018We are here and we are getting our just due.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cA lot of our culture is now in pop society,\u201d he said. \u201cWe don\u2019t mind you guys admiring it, but we would like you to know that there is a valid history. We want to take advantage of the platform to give people a little more education.\u201d<\/p>\n